My PC is abnormally slow when coming back to if after a while?

M

munkle

[H]F Junkie
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Jan 16, 2005
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I don't remember my PC being like this when I bought it but this is the situation. When I leave my PC alone for long period of time (20+ min) the screensaver turns off and the screen is just black, well this is all fine and dandy and whats suposed to happen. But when I move the mouse to get back on my PC after being away for so long it takes a while to do anything, and its just really laggy. I can hear the hard drive being accessed alot while its in this laggy state, after about 10 seconds or so of being really laggy, my pc goes back to normal speed and applications start at a normal speed. Is this normal? My pc is upto date on everything including the bios.

My pc is:
Asus a8n-e (NF4U)
2x512mb ram (corsair value ram)
X800XL
1 80gb sata hard drive (os on this one)
1 160gb ide hard drive (games on this one)
1 200gb ide hard drive (storage drive)
all drives are seagates
Nec dvd burner from newegg, I forget the model but it is the popular one.
Antec truepower 2.0 550watt
 
If I had to take a guess, I'd say that most of the stuff in RAM that isn't being used (your desktop) is being put into virtual memory. There must be somewhere in Windows (i'm assuming you are using windows) to disable that.
 
If you leave XP for 20 mins or so it'll do a little defragging of sorts on it's own. Not a full defrag, but it'll play with the prefetch stuff and optimise the boto time a little. I tend to find that, opposite to you, if I leav emy Pc for a while and come back, it's alot faster as it seems windows has cached all the icons etc and it's all super smooth.

I can't guess as why it'd ever be slower other than maybe Windows uses up all your spare ram in doing it's tasks and as the guy above said, it then has to page out alot of stuff to make more ram available. 1 gig of ram just isn't enough these days, you should consider buying some more. Trust me, even just another 512 will make a world of difference.
 
spine said:
If you leave XP for 20 mins or so it'll do a little defragging of sorts on it's own. Not a full defrag, but it'll play with the prefetch stuff and optimise the boto time a little. I tend to find that, opposite to you, if I leav emy Pc for a while and come back, it's alot faster as it seems windows has cached all the icons etc and it's all super smooth.

I can't guess as why it'd ever be slower other than maybe Windows uses up all your spare ram in doing it's tasks and as the guy above said, it then has to page out alot of stuff to make more ram available. 1 gig of ram just isn't enough these days, you should consider buying some more. Trust me, even just another 512 will make a world of difference.
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Well I have never fully used 1gig of ram, closest I have come is 900mb playing WoW but even then it didn't max out, If I leave task manager open and then come back after 20 min when it is laggy it shows only ~280 mb of ram usage.

are you running norton?
Click to expand...

Nope avg free, and zone alarm.

But I completely forgot about this, I fold for the horde, so could that be why its so laggy when I come back because its folding at 100%? I didnt think about it at the time because it's supposed to give up using the processor when anything else needs it.
 
XP by default also shuts off the HD after 20 mins.

right click your desktop / properties / Screen Saver / Power

and change the items there.
 
I check the power tab, turn off hard disks was set to never, and hibernate is set to never, and standby is set to never.
 
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